It has taken decades, but authors throughout the United States are finally beginning to assess the stark reality of Mao’s revolutionary appeal, his archaic mien; a deeply irresponsible leader who sought the unification of China so as to compete with mechanized, industrial nations that were overcoming China as evidenced in Mao’s insights throughout the early 20th century.

China Under Mao: A revolution derailed is finally out from Harvard University Press by Dr. Andrew G. Walder, a professor of Sociology at Stanford University. A deeply moving tribute to the disaster that became of China under Mao’s rule and its subsequent reversal under Deng.

Any book that seeks to detail the atrocities of both the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward will need to reconcile such gross behavior to its social, political impact. The truth isn’t difficult to comprehend; Mao’s policies of forcing militant socialism, of seeking to impose ruthless anarchy so as to create a more equitable, more malleable individual, bereft of family or nominal stability, served the interests of a monolithic state only.

Their have been other accounts written by Roderick Macfarquhar & Michael Schoenhals published as Mao’s Last Revolution or, Tombstone: the great Chinese famine by Yang Jisheng. Both accounts detail astonishing gross genocidal behavior that animated ‘the achievements‘ of Mao. All at the expense of China.

An exhausted, depleted and ruined China sought reversal after the demise of Mao. A failed tyrant. Damn the man.